The English Novel by George Saintsbury (essential reading TXT) 📖

of the early Anglo-Catholics. William Gresley and others wrote stories mostly for the young. But the distinguishing feature of the school, and that which gives it an honourable and more than an honorary place here, was the shape which, before the middle of the century, it took in the hands of two ladies, Elizabeth Sewell and Charlotte Mary Yonge.

The first, who was the elder but survived Miss Yonge and died at a very great age quite recently, had much less talent than her junior: but undoubtedly deserves the credit of setting the style. In her novels ( Gertrude, Katharine Ashton , etc.) she carried, even farther than Miss Austen, the principle of confining herself rigidly to the events of ordinary life. Not that she eschews the higher middle or even the higher classes: though, on the other hand, Katharine Ashton, evidently one of her favourite heroines, is the daughter of a shopkeeper. But the law of average and ordinary character, incident, atmosphere, is observed almost invariably. Unfortunately Miss Sewell (she was actually a schoolmistress) let the didactic part of her novels get rather too much the upper hand: and though she wrote good English, possessed no special grace of style, and little faculty of illustration or ornament from history, literature, her own fancy, current fashions, even of the most harmless kind, and so forth. The result is that her books have a certain dead-aliveness--that the characters, though actually alive, are neither interestingly alive nor, as Miss Austen had made hers, interesting in their very uninterestingness. Sometimes, for a scene or two, her truth to nature and fact is rewarded by that curious sense of recognition which the reader feels in the presence of actual mimesis --of creation of fictitious fact and person. But this is not common: and the epithet "dull," which too commonly only stigmatises the person using it, may really suggest itself not seldom in reference to Miss Sewell. A "success of esteem" is about the utmost that can be accorded her.

With Miss Yonge the case was very different. She was a lady of wide reading and, even according to the modern rather arbitrary restrictions of the term, something of an historical scholar; she had humour, of which there was scarcely a particle in Miss Sewell's composition; she had a very considerable understanding, and consequently some toleration of the infinite varieties, and at least the more venial foibles, of human temperament. She possessed an inexhaustible command of dialogue which was always natural and sometimes very far from trivial; and if she had no command of the greater novelists' imagination in the creation of character and story, she had an almost uncanny supply of invention, of what may be called the second or third class, in these respects. She wrote too much and too long; but it cannot be said that she ever merely repeated herself. And her best books--the famous Heir of Redclyffe (1853), which captivated William Morris and his friends at Oxford, and which, with a little unnecessary sentimentality and a little "unco-guidness," is full of cleverness, nature, good sense, good taste, and good form; Heartsease (1854), perhaps the best of all; Dynevor Terrace (1857), less of a general favourite but full of good things; and the especially popular Daisy Chain (1856), with not a few others--are things which no courageous and catholic critic of fiction will ever be tired of defending or (which is not always the same thing) of reading. Some of her early tales, before these, were a little "raw": and most of her later work showed (as did Anthony Trollope's and that of other though not all very prolific novelists) that the field had been overcropped. But she was hardly ever dull: and she always had that quality--if not of the supreme artist, of the real craftsman--which prevents a thing from being a failure. What is meant is done: though perhaps it might have been meant higher.

The comparison, backwards and forwards, of this great company of novels is of endless interest; perhaps one of many aspects of that interest may be touched on specially, because it connects itself with much else that has been said. If we read, together or in near sequence, three such books as, say, Emilia Wyndbam, Pendennis , and Yeast , all of which appeared close together, between 1846 and 1849, the differences, in quality and volume of individual genius, will of course strike every one forcibly. But some will also be struck by something else--the difference between the first and the other two in style or (as that word is almost hopelessly ambiguous) let us perhaps say diction . Both Thackeray and Kingsley are almost perfectly modern in this. We may not speak so well to-day, and we may have added more slang and jargon to our speech, but there is no real difference, except in these respects, between a speech of Pen's (when not talking book) or one of Colonel Bracebridge's, and the speech of any gentleman who is a barrister or a guardsman at this hour. The excellent Mrs. Marsh had not arrived at that point; what some people call the "stilted" forms and phrases of fifty or almost a hundred years earlier clung to her still. The resulting lingo is far better than that part of the lingo of to-day where literary and linguistic good manners have been forgotten altogether: but it is distinctly deficient in ease . There are endless flourishes and periphrases--the colloquialisms which Swift and others had denounced (and quite properly) in their ugliest and vulgarest forms are not even permitted entrance in improved and warranted varieties. You must never say "won't" but always "will not," whereas the ability to use the two forms adds infinite propriety as well as variety to the dialogue. You say, "At length a most unfortunate accident aggravated (if aggravation were possible) the unfortunate circumstances of the situation." You address your own characters in the oratorical manner of Mr. Burke and other great men, "Ah, Mr. Danby! if instead, etc." In short, instead of reserving the grand manner (and a rather different grand manner) for grand occasions, you maintain a sort of cheap machine-made kind of it throughout. The real secret of the novel was not found out till this was discarded. Perhaps that real secret does not lie so much anywhere else as here.

A few words may not improperly be said about some of the circumstances and details of novel-appearance and distribution, etc., at this palmy day of English fiction. At what time the famous "three-decker" was consecrated as the regular novel line-of-battle-ship I have not been able to determine exactly to my own satisfaction. Richardson had extended his interminable narrations to seven or eight volumes: Miss Burney latterly had not been content with less than five. From the specimens I have examined, I have an idea that with the "Minerva Press" and its contemporaries and successors at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, four was a very favourite if not the most usual number. But these volumes were usually small--not much larger than those of the Belgian reprints of Dumas which, as one remembers, used to run into the dozen or something like it in the case of his longer books. Three, however, has obvious advantages; the chief of them being the adjustment to "beginning, middle, and end," though there is a corresponding disadvantage which soon developed itself--and in fact, finally, I have no doubt helped to ruin the form--the temptation to make the second volume a place of mere padding. But the actual popularity of "the old three-decker" continued for quite two generations, if not more, and was unmistakable. Library subscriptions were generally adjusted to it; and any circulating-library keeper would tell you that, putting this quite aside, even subscribers to more or fewer volumes than three would take the three-volume by preference. More than this, still, there is a curious fact necessarily known to comparatively few people. Although it was improper of Mr. Bludyer to sell his novel, and dine and drink of the profits before "smashing" it, there were probably not many reviewers who did not get rid of most of their books of this kind, if for no other reasons than that no house, short of a palace, would have held them all. And, in the palmy days of circulating libraries, the price given by second-hand booksellers for novels made a very considerable addition to the reviewer's remuneration or guerdon. But these booksellers would not pay, in proportion, for two or one volume books--alleging, what no doubt was true, that the libraries had a lower tariff for them. Further, the short story, now so popular, was very un popular in those days: and library customers would refuse collections of them with something like indignation or disgust. Indeed, there are reviewers living who may perhaps pride themselves on having done something to drive the dislike out and the liking in.

The circulating library itself, though not the creation of the novel, was very largely extended by it, and helped no doubt very largely to extend the circulation of the novel in turn. Before it, to some extent, and long before so-called "public" or "free" libraries, books in general and novels in particular had been very largely diffused by clubs, "institutions," and other forms of co-operative individual enterprise, the bookplates of which will be found in many a copy of an old novel now. Sometimes these were purely private associations of neighbours: sometimes they belonged to more or less extensive establishments, like that defunct "Russell Institution in Great Coram Street," which a great author, who was its neighbour, once took for an example of desolation; or the still existing and flourishing "Philosophical" examples in Edinburgh and Bath. In these latter cases, of course, novels were not allowed to be the main constituents of the library; in fact in some, but few, they may have been sternly excluded. On the other hand, the private-adventure circulating libraries tended more and more, with few exceptions, to rely on novels only--"Mudie's" and a few more being exceptions. Very few people, I suppose, ever bought three-volume novels; and the fact that they went almost wholly to the libraries, and were there worn to pieces, accounts for the comparative rarity of good copies. The circulating library has survived both the decease of the three-volume novel and the competition of the so-called free library. But it is pretty certain that it was a chief cause--and almost the whole
sustaining cause--of the three-volume system itself. Nor was the connection between nature of form and system of distribution limited to England: for the single-volume novel, though older in France than with us, is not so very old.

But a very considerable proportion of these famous books made appearances previous to that in three volumes, and not distantly connected with their popularity. For the most part these previous appearances were either in magazines or periodicals of one kind and another, or else in "parts."

Neither process was exactly new, though both were largely affected by changed conditions of general literature and life. The magazine-appearance traces itself, by almost insensible gradations, to the original periodical-essay of the Steele-Addison type--the small individual bulk of which necessitated division of whatsoever was not itself on a very small scale. If you run down the "Contents" of the
British Essayists you will constantly find "Continuation of the story of Alonso and Imoinda" and the like. But when, in the early years of the nineteenth century, the system of newspapers and periodicals branched out into endless development, coincidently with the increase of demand and supply in regard to the novel, it was inevitable that this latter should be drawn upon to supply at once the standing dishes and the relishes